In its scope and inclusiveness, this ambitious volume is far more than a history of the literature of France from its origins to the present day, though it is that too. It is a book that fully registers the impact of post-modern thought upon our understanding of what we mean by 'literature' and what historically has been meant by the term. David Coward's book allows us to see the diverse wealth of French literature, which has been extended and enriched by new Francophone writing in Europe, Canada, the West Indies and North and Sub-Saharan Africa. His history is set in the widest cultural context and links the development of literature to the mentalities and social conditions which produced it.

Coward takes us beyond 'literature' into the world of the best-seller and, beyond words, to graphic fiction and cinema. In the course of his account he maps the rise of the intellectual, from the time of Dreyfus to the divisions of the 1930s, from the Existentialists to the Post-Structuralists and beyond, and in so doing charts a progression from literary doctrine to critical theory.

Whatever the subject in hand, from the 'feminism' of the Middle Ages to the Feminism of the present, from the 'modernism' of the fifteenth century to the Modernism we associate with Proust and his contemporaries, Coward proves to be a fascinating and inspiring guide. Topics, themes and genres are clearly signposted so that the reader may follow the evolution of theatre, poetry or fiction as well as wider matters such as censorship and writers' rewards. The text is complemented by a fully comprehensive and reader-friendly index.

David Coward is Research Professor in French at the University of Leeds. He has written widely on the literature and culture of France since 1700 and has translated tales by Sade and Maupassant, plays by Molière and novels by Diderot and Dumas fils. His English version of Albert Cohen's Belle du Seigneur was awarded the Scott-Moncrieff Prize for Translation in 1996. He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and is a contributor to the literary pages of magazines and newspapers in the UK and US.